COLLEGE has its problems. It’s expensive, it has some outdated traditions and it has a tendency to produce graduates who struggle to find jobs in the rapidly changing economy.

In the parlance of the tech industry, higher education is ripe for disruption. And Silicon Valley loves to talk about the end of college as we know it, whether by turning everyone into a start-up founder or funneling future students through massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

Still, traditional colleges aren’t going away anytime soon and tech entrepreneurs have realized this, too. There are several companies that let students take better advantage of the college education they are getting, instead of the education of the future.

“Learning has been an inefficient market,” said Dan Rosensweig, the chief executive of Chegg, an education services company. “The price of books, the diversity of who you can learn from, the geography of where you can learn. It’s now getting more and more efficient.”

Textbooks have been a particularly ripe target. In a report last year, the Government Accountability Office said the price of new textbooks rose 82 percent from 2002 to 2012, only slightly less than the 89 percent rise in tuition and fees, and far higher than the 28 percent rise in overall consumer prices.

The average student now spends over $600 a year on textbooks and other course-related material, according to the National Association of College Stores. But savvier shopping can probably cut book costs significantly.

Federal law requires colleges to post lists of their required materials online before students arrive on campus. That allows for price comparisons with online stores, especially if the reading is novels or historical works. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche was available at the University of California, Berkeley, bookstore for about $19 used, but another version was just $6 new at Amazon or free for the Kindle.

Some schools try to push students toward campus bookstores, and some financial aid vouchers are good only at campus stores. But students can and should seek other options when available. And don’t forget about the library.

Some university bookstores, like Berkeley’s, offer rentals and allow renters to highlight and write notes in the books. Chegg rents textbooks to students, as do sites like Campus Book Rentals and BookRenter.

Amazon offers some textbook rentals, although there are restrictions on what states books can be shipped to.

Packback is trying to improve on the textbook rental idea by offering on-demand digital book rentals for $3 to $5 day. The assumption is that students don’t always need a textbook for an entire semester — they may need it only a few times a year.

Kasey Gandham started Packback in 2012 with Mike Shannon, a fellow graduate of Illinois State University, when they were still in college. “It’s a no-brainer that textbooks were too expensive,” Mr. Gandham said, “but no one was ever really addressing the problem of why they’re so expensive to begin with.”

Mr. Gandham said textbook prices had entered a vicious cycle: They’re expensive, so students buy them used and then resell them as used books for someone else to buy. In those cases, publishers get no revenue and may need to raise prices of their new books to offset fewer sales.

Photo

Credit
Minh Uong/The New York Times

“The solution,” he said, “was the thing that was driving up prices.”

If students rent digital textbooks through Packback, they can take notes and make highlights in the e-book reader the company created. If they return the books and rent them again, the notes will still be there. And if students find they’re renting the book over and over, they can convert what they’ve already spent toward buying the book outright.

Other companies realize that the entire textbook may not be necessary. A site called Boundless is hoping to upend both books and teaching with a sort of open-sourced approach toward teaching materials. Boundless packages freely available information from public sources like Wikipedia or research papers and offers them as “alternative” textbooks (to the considerable ire of publishers). Students can buy the books for $20.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Boundless also hopes to be a teaching platform. Educators can get texts free, along with course material like quizzes, and then teach directly from these cheaper sources — a kind of disruption from the top down.

Tech entrepreneurs are also building services far beyond textbooks that are meant to help students be smarter college consumers.

One option already known to many students is Chegg, which is evolving from a textbook search and rental site into a full-fledged resource for digitally savvy students.

The company recently acquired InstaEDU, a tutoring service that helps students get immediate access to low-cost tutoring — “Uber for tutors,” Mr. Rosensweig of Chegg calls it.

“It democratizes tutoring,” he said. “You can get a tutor in any subject, any language, any time of day for as little as 40 cents a minute.” And on the flip side, InstaEDU lets college students offer their own tutoring services for up to $20 an hour.

Chegg also offers an internship search engine that matches openings with students’ disciplines, location and whether they want to get paid.

There’s also a career search with job descriptions, salary ranges and videos of real people explaining what they actually do for a living.

“Less than 50 percent of all college students in this country use their career center, and less than 2 percent get a job from it,” Mr. Rosensweig said. “When we launched our service, in six months almost 500,000 students used it.”

And sites like Chegg help students keep student loans to a minimum by making it easier to search for grants and scholarships that can offset tuition costs. Such scholarships have always been available, but they’re often hard to find, spread out across multiple sources, and the application process can be hard.

And in the end, isn’t a lot of college about learning to choose the right options? If we’re not going to remake college education tomorrow, it is surely worth making the most out of it now.

“Degrees are the currency in America; they’re part of our history,” says Kim Taylor, founder and chief executive of Ranku, a site that helps prospective students find online degree programs from accredited, nonprofit universities. “The biggest issues in schools is they’re in denial that students are consumers.”

Not only are students consumers, they’re the generation of consumers that expect the web and modern technology to make their lives more efficient and connected. If higher education can’t keep up, they’ll find other options, and they’ve got an army of start-ups ready to help.

A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2014, on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Bringing the Culture of Tech to the Staid College Quad. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe